Posts Tagged ‘Insane 2’

I don’t drive. I get scared just pondering what arcane knowledge is required for a gear change (seriously: how?). I’m unable to appreciate the basics of realistic car physics, and I can only turn in a serious racing game when the side of the track is pushing me in that direction, scraping off adversing slogans in a slow, spark-filled cornering manoeuvre I like to call “The Pearson Gambit”. I need something unsubtle and exaggerated. So I’ve spent a few hours with Insane 2, the car basher that surprisingly appeared on Steam this morning. I have some thoughts!

Okay, how to go through this without getting confused? Well, since I can barely get through putting on a pair of trousers without confusion (why do they make the arm-holes so big?), it’s not likely. But as far as I can tell, Insane 2 is a sequel to the Codies game from 2000, 1nSANE, a multiplayer off-road racer. And is nothing to do with inSANE, the THQ project from Pan’s Labyrinth director, Guillermo del Toro. But then, it also appears to have previously been released in October, onto GamersGate exclusively. And, oh, I don’t know. It’s out on Steam today, which they appear to be treating as a second coming, and there’s a trailer below. You know what, it looks decent.

When I saw the announcement for Insane 2, which is out a little later this year, something stirred, deep in the lost vaults of my head. Insane. Yes. Why do I know that name? A bit of Googling later and I realise that the original insane (which cleverly anticipated the letter-as-numbers-in-sequels thing by being called 1nsane, which surely means this one should be called In2ane) is one of the first games I ever reviewed in anger – a multiplayer offroad racing game from Codemasters released in 2000. 2000! That’s almost a thousand years ago. Quite why Codies decided to make a sequel to a game that people who played it can barely remember is beyond me, but there it is. Actually, I vaguely suspect it is a rebranded version of a game that has already come out in Russia, but I can’t be sure. There’s a video of the game below. You sure to race about and stuff.